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by
James Suzman
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October 9 - November 6, 2021
the only thing that differentiates work from leisure is context and whether we are being paid to do something or are paying to do
Abandoning the idea that the economic problem is the eternal condition of the human race does more than extend the definition of work beyond how we make a living. It provides us with a new lens through which to view our deep historical relationship with work from the very beginnings of life through to our busy present.
It reveals, for instance, how our relationships with working machines are resonant of the relationship between early farmers and the cart horses, oxen, and other beasts of burden that aided them in their work, and how our anxieties about automation are remarkably reminiscent of those that kept people in slave-owning societies awake at night, and why.
The diverse mythologies of the world may or may not offer us a window into our “collective unconscious,” explain our sexual hang-ups, or let us peer into the deep structures of our minds. But there is no doubt that they reveal some things that are universal to human experience. One is the idea that our world—no matter how perfect it was at the moment of creation—is subject to chaotic forces and that humans must work to keep these in check.
It is no coincidence that tension between chaos and order is a feature of the world’s mythologies.
Over and above the fact that “work” described exactly what steam engines were designed to do, the French word for work, travail, has a poetic quality that is absent in many other languages. It connotes not just effort but also suffering, and so evoked the recent tribulations of France’s Third Estate—the lower classes—that had labored for so long under the yoke of wigged aristocrats and monarchs with a taste for grandeur.
Living things have a number of distinct characteristics that non-living things do not. The most obvious and important of these is that living things actively harvest and use energy to organize their atoms and molecules into cells, their cells into organs, and their organs into bodies; to grow and to reproduce; and when they stop doing that they die and, with no energy to hold them together, they decompose. Put another way, to live is to work.
And in time, like the malevolent trickster god Loki of Norse mythology, the second law of thermodynamics insists that entropy will bring about an Armageddon—not because it will destroy the universe but rather because, when it achieves its goal of distributing all energy evenly across the universe, no free energy will be available with the result that no work, in the physical sense of the word, can be done.
“If you ask me about my innermost conviction whether our century will be called the century of iron or the century of steam or electricity,” Boltzmann announced to his audience, “I answer without hesitation: it will be called the century of the mechanical view of nature, the century of Darwin.”
Schrödinger’s father was an enthusiastic amateur gardener. He was especially fascinated by the way he could tip evolution’s hand by carefully selecting seeds of plants with specific characteristics he found desirable. Inspired by his father’s horticultural experiments, Schrödinger retained an interest in heredity and evolution that endured long after theoretical physics became the main focus of his work.
Schrödinger’s wonder for the ability of the “incredibly small group of atoms”6 that comprise a genome to organize trillions of other atoms into hair, livers, fingers, eyeballs, and so on was because these atoms did so in apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics.
The fact that abiogenesis—the process by which life first appeared—involved work is perhaps the least mysterious part of it. Up until the turn of the third millennium, the balance of scientific data suggested that the emergence of life was so improbable that we were almost certainly alone in the universe. Now, for some scientists at least, the pendulum has swung the other way. They are more inclined to think that life may have been inevitable and that entropy, the trickster god, was not just a destroyer but may well have also been the creator of life. This perspective is based on the idea that
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As cyanobacteria flourished, so they set to work transforming the earth into a macro-habitat capable of supporting far more complex life forms with much higher energy demands.
If natural selection was the “struggle for existence,” he argued, then sexual selection was the “struggle for mates” and accounted for the evolution of a host of “secondary sexual characteristics” that might be disadvantageous to an individual organism’s chances of survival but massively boosted its chances of reproducing.
Evolution, in other words, directed organisms to acquire and expend energy both on staying alive and on making themselves attractive, and where the former demanded efficiency and control, the latter tended to encourage wastefulness and flamboyance.
The behavior of some other species, like the serial builder and breaker of nests, the southern masked weaver bird of southern Africa, suggests that the need to expend energy may have played as important a role in shaping some traits as the demands of capturing it.
active avoidance of competition may be as important a driver of speciation in evolution as competition.
many hard-to-explain animal traits and behaviors may well have been shaped by the seasonal over-abundance of energy rather than the battle for scarce resources, and that in this may lie a clue as to why we, the most energy-profligate of all species, work so hard.
Not only are we the product of the different kinds of work our ancestors did and the skills they acquired, but we are also shaped progressively over the course of our lives by the different kinds of work we do.
Over time, our evolutionary ancestors’ growing dependency on tools redirected their evolutionary trajectory by progressively selecting in favor of bodies better optimized to make and use tools.
This is made plain by the fact that the bulk of the energy surplus acquired through using tools and cooking that might otherwise have been directed toward making our ancestors grow bigger, stronger, quicker, or more toothsome was instead directed toward building, remodeling, and maintaining ever bigger, more complex, and plastic brains, and reorganizing our bodies to accommodate these exceptionally large lumps of neural tissue.
Where most animal species have evolved a series of highly specialized capabilities honed over generations of natural selection, enabling them to exploit specific environments, our ancestors shortcut this process by becoming progressively more plastic and more versatile. In other words, they became skilled at acquiring skills.
If so, then Homo erectus may have clung on so doggedly to the hand-ax design because the ability to learn from others was a far more beneficial adaptation at first than problem solving.
In just the same way that this sentence only makes sense because words are presented in a particular order, so the process of making tools requires that a specific hierarchy of operations is followed.
Large primates are already outliers in the animal world in terms of the amount of raw physical work their brains do, just by processing and organizing information.
the morphological changes to our mouths, throats, and larynxes enabled by eating cooked foods also provided us the hardware with which to talk.
Hypotheses put forward include Grammaticalization theory, which suggests the rules of languages grow incrementally from the use of a few basic verbal concepts over a long period of time, and Noam Chomsky’s Single Step theory, which proposes that our ancestors’ ability to use language came about near instantly after a single evolutionary step completed the circuitry needed to switch on a cognitive grammar-forming apparatus that we all share.
The gossip part of the thesis comes from the fact that, as complex social beings, our favorite thing to do is to gossip with others about others.
Systematic, well-organized, non-reciprocal sharing outside of a parental context, in other words, is a uniquely human trait, one that would not be possible without fire.
Some also demand that we abandon the well-established visual metaphor of portraying evolutionary history as a tree, with a discrete trunk, branches, and twigs representing the distribution of genetic information across generations and between the different kingdoms, clades, orders, families, genera, and species that make up all living things. Because when we zoom in tighter on the tree we see that it better resembles an inland river delta comprised of thousands of intersecting channels that variously merge with and split from one another.
At the very least it reveals that the makers of the flakes were sufficiently purposeful and determined to trek very long distances to specific sites to acquire the best possible materials with which to make their stone tools.
the only thing universal about market capitalism was the hubris of its most enthusiastic advocates.
The substantivists insisted that the economic rationality the formalists believed was part of human nature was a cultural by-product of market capitalism, and that we should be far more open-minded when it came to making sense of how other people apportioned value, worked, or exchanged things with one another.
Hunter-gatherers, he concluded, had so much more free time than others mainly because they were not ridden with a whole host of nagging desires beyond meeting their immediate material needs.
He didn’t care a great deal more about his colleagues’ criticism than he did about some of his neighbors’ gossip when he settled into a new home, as part of an openly gay, interracial couple, in one of the most conservative small towns in Virginia.
Second, they revealed that even if they had few needs that were easily met, forager economies were underwritten by the confidence they had in the providence of their environments.
This behavior perplexed farming peoples and later colonial and government officials as well as development workers who came into regular contact with hunter-gatherers. To them, growing and storing food was something that set humans apart from other animals.
Woodburn described the Hadzabe as having an “immediate return economy.”4 He contrasted this with the “delayed return economies” of industrial and farming societies. In delayed-return economies, he noted that labor effort is almost always focused primarily on meeting future rewards, and this was what differentiated groups like the Ju/’hoansi and the BaMbuti not only from farming and industrialized societies, but also from the large-scale complex hunter-gatherer societies like those living alongside the salmon-rich waters of the Pacific Northwest coast of America.
all immediate-return societies also spurned hierarchy, did not have chiefs, leaders, or institutional authority figures, and were intolerant of any meaningful material wealth differentials between individuals.
In other words, in these societies the obligation to share was open-ended and the amount of stuff that you gave away was determined by how much stuff you had relative to others.
That people of all political stripes now distinguish between the makers and takers, producers and parasites, even if they define the categories somewhat differently, might suggest that the conflict between the industrious and idle in our societies is a universal one. But the fact that among demand-sharing foragers these distinctions were considered to be relatively unimportant suggests that this particular conflict is of a far more recent provenance.
But Homo sapiens are also a social and highly collaborative species. We are well adapted to working together. We also all know from bitter experience that the short-term benefits of self-interest are almost always outweighed by the longer-term social costs.
“When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors,” one particularly eloquent Ju/’hoan man explained to Richard Lee. “We can’t accept this. . . . So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”8 Being insulted, even if only light-heartedly, was not the only price good hunters had to pay for their hard work and their skill.
The Ju/’hoansi had another trick to deal with this. They insisted that the actual owner of the meat, the individual charged with its distribution, was not the hunter, but the person who owned the arrow that killed the animal. More often than not this was the individual hunter. But it was not unusual for keen hunters to borrow arrows from less enthusiastic hunters precisely so that they could avoid the burden of having to distribute the meat. This also meant that the elderly, the short-sighted, the clubfooted, and the lazy got a chance to be the center of attention once in a while.
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Somewhat ironically, it was only when the earth began to warm 18,000 years ago that anyone would take the first fateful steps toward food production, and so lay the foundations of our species’ increasing energy footprint and obsession with work.
But the ever-expanding wealth of new material, supporting her theory that the Natufians played a pivotal role in the transition to agriculture, includes evidence that they may well have also been the first people anywhere to relax with an alcoholic drink after a day’s work.
Fossil-fuel-fixated humans are by no means the first or the only living organism to have substantially changed the atmospheric composition sufficiently to radically transform the climate. We still have a long way to go before we make an impact comparable to that made by carbon dioxide–eating cyanobacteria during the great oxidation event that preceded the efflorescence of oxygen-breathing life forms on early earth.
Analysis of Greenlandic ice cores shows that the end of the last glacial period was marked by a surge in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
With a warming climate and a more carbon dioxide–rich atmosphere causing some familiar food species to disappear while simultaneously ratcheting up the productivity of others, local populations, through no fault of their own, became increasingly dependent on far fewer but much more prolific plants.
Where future grain farmers would be held captive to an agricultural calendar, with specific seasons for plowing, preparing, planting, irrigating, weeding, harvesting, and processing their crops, all the Natufians had to do was wander out to established fields of wild stands of wheat, harvest, and process them.
